


How'd I Get So Faded (how'd i get so faded)

by musiclily88



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Drug Addiction, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 09:51:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4474796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musiclily88/pseuds/musiclily88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Premise: Louis’ in a punk band and plays shitty pubs after getting fucked up. Maybe too fucked up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How'd I Get So Faded (how'd i get so faded)

**Author's Note:**

> I—I think I wrote a fic about drug addiction and recovery? What the hell?
> 
> Um. I wrote this in about two hours and all mistakes are my own and I DO NOT MEAN to imply anything about real people or their respective personas.
> 
> Title from Ed Sheeran's song "Bloodstream."

He thinks he has blood on his teeth and he bares them at the cracked mirror in the shitty toilets of the shitty pub they’re playing in tonight, bares his teeth in a grimace or a smile. The mirror’s cracked and he thinks maybe so is he, thinks maybe some organ inside him is seeping liquid into his lungs and into his bloodstream.

The chemicals have done Louis wrong this time, but not as wrong as he seems to have done himself.

He wonders if someone’s going to enter the otherwise empty bathrooms behind, wonders if he can scare them to the path of righteousness and away from—whatever he’s on. The road to ruin, maybe.

He pulls at his hair and thinks it’s probably actually _not_ caught fire, but he can’t be sure. He knows the bruises on his arms are real, knows the needle-point pinpricks are real, too.

The blood on his teeth is a mystery.

 

When he wakes up the next afternoon, he has no idea if he made it to the show in any position to perform, but the screen of his cracked mobile doesn’t have any angry texts lighting it up, so perhaps he did okay. Their music is mostly screaming at the direction of the audience, let’s be honest, because that’s all Louis can manage on a good day, not to mention a bad night.

Everything hurts, but that’s not new, so he just presses two fingers into the deep divots by his hips, trying to remember when he last ate.

He swallows two pills dry and lets everything fade again, running his tongue over his bloody teeth.

 

 

Everything hurts before their show that night, too, another filthy pub, another home for Louis to make a name in. He’s two pints deep and sitting in the back, watching Liam tune his bass, watching his own hand purple and bruise before fading back to pale-English-white. It’s kind of mesmerizing.

He thinks his teeth are bleeding again, it was never his gums leaking iron-flavoured tang onto his teeth, it’s always been his teeth themselves.

Fuck. His teeth are bleeding.

He laughs at this, shortly and just once, earning a curious glance from Liam. The look gets too probing too quick, and Louis stumbles to his feet, one hand still clutching his pint of lager.

“Gonna take a smoke break before we go on,” he mumbles, making his feet work so he can leave the backroom and head to the alleyway. He brings his glass with him, settling against the brick wall and onto the dirty pavement.

He lights up a cigarette and probably his fringe, too, with the amount of smoke around his face and in his field of vision. It might be funny to be on fire, he thinks, just for a change of pace. He laughs again, the sound ringing tinny in the narrow alley.

Eventually the door opens again and someone walks into the alley, too, even though Louis’ protective of things that are _his._ This alley is his.

“Are you real?” he asks, first-off, to determine if he has to guard his treasure and gold.

“Sure.”

Louis looks to his left, cigarette in his mouth and pint his in hand, cross-legged as he is on the pavement. There’s someone there, all right, someone probably around his age, if he is indeed real. He’s got his hair all tied up at the back of his head and he’s wearing fairly skinny jeans, but his face sparkles. Louis laughs. Louis wants to scare him.

He bares his teeth, wondering if his own face is sparkling, too.

“You all right, mate?” the stranger says, inching towards him rather than away. Which, no, that wasn’t what he intended.

He bares his teeth again, not managing to catch his cigarette when it falls out of his mouth.

“Nah,” is all Louis can say, looking down at his half-smoked fag where it’s sitting on his thigh. Apparently that’s real, because the stranger is looking at it too, peering curiously at Louis’ leg. “That’s real, too, then, is it?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.” Louis nods slowly, narrowing his eyes. He lets the cigarette be. It seems to be enjoying itself. Instead Louis lets himself take a drink, careless of the way he’ll be swallowing blood along with his lager.

“Christ.” Suddenly fingers are plucking at his leg, taking away his cigarette and stubbing it out.

“Hey, that was mine.”

“I can’t have you self-immolating here, mate, it’s not that kind of place.”

“What kind of place is it?”

“Classy,” says the stranger, but his lips quirk like that might a joke.

Louis laughs, cracking into the alleyway. Even he knows how to laugh. He starts to hum, taking another sip from his drink. “Are you real, then?”

“You already asked me that.”

“Force of habit.”

“Yeah,” the stranger breathes. “You’ve got some kind of a habit, anyway.”

Louis doesn’t consider his words much. “I think there’s somewhere I’m meant to be.”

“Somewhere besides an alleyway, with me?”

“Probably,” Louis agrees.

“You’re not supposed to have drinks out here, I wouldn’t think, so maybe there’s a lot you’re supposed to be doing.”

“I’m not meant to be bleeding so much, I don’t think.”

“Bleeding?” The guy sits down beside him, but not too close.

“Just, generally, you know.” He gestures to his face, baring his teeth in another grimace. “My teeth haven’t got the memo.”

“Your teeth aren’t bleeding, mate.”

“Sure they are.” Louis hums, turning to look at this guy again. “So are you.” He leans in and presses a thumb to the spot beneath one of the stranger’s eyes. He startles away, which, yeah, Louis would too. It’s new, though, to meet someone Louis can disgust as much as he disgusts himself. Louis laughs.

“Your hands are cold.”

“Okay. Sorry about that.”

“Think you should get inside?”

“I can’t bleed in the bar, they’d get mad at me. I don’t have enough for a deposit.”

“Mate, you’re not bleeding.”

“Sure I am.”

The stranger sighs. “What’s your name?”

“Louis.” That sounds right, doesn’t it?

“I’m Harry. Let’s get inside, okay?”

Louis goes limp like a ragdoll, dropping his near-empty glass onto the pavement with another cracking laugh. His head falls back against the brick wall when Harry tries to help him stand, one arm beneath his armpit and the other on his hip. How is all this happening?

They stagger to standing. “You’re tall, Harry,” Louis says with solemnity, once they’re both leaning against the wall of the pub.

“Yes, thank you. Are you going to die on me, Louis?”

Louis scrunches up his face. This sounds like a calculus equation. He was never very good at maths. “Aren’t I dead already?”

“Afraid not.”

“Oh.” Louis shrugs. “I had no idea.”

 

 

His chest breaks open during their set, right when he leans against the microphone stand during their last song, right when he looks at Harry in a booth to the right of the pub. Then the song ends, and Louis can’t stop cackling. He can’t breathe.

 

:::

He doesn’t have the money for rehab, but he can’t stand the puppy-dog looks Liam keeps giving him, despite the fact that he _vividly recalls_ seeing Liam snort coke off a bartender’s collarbones just last week.

Louis thinks things are dire when even Niall corners him, handing him a sweating bottle of beer, looking chagrined. He rounds out his lecture with _mate, you can’t keep doing this to yourself_ and _I just worry you’re going to get hurt._

Of course he’s going to get hurt. He’s constantly fucking hurting. That’s the idea.

The breaking point, the tipping of the scale, comes when Zayn says he’s giving up spliff, looking pointedly at Louis and frowning.

 

Louis pulls out his cracked mobile and looks up local Narcotics Anonymous groups while he’s still sober enough to read.

 

:::

 

Louis regrets the fact that he’s too poor for real rehab as soon as he takes a sip of the shitty coffee at his first NA meeting. He doesn’t even actually like coffee, but he needs something to do with his hands, and coffee’s it. Literally it.

He barely listens when people move to the front of the room to talk, like this is some sort of school presentation and everyone’s to have prepared a Powerpoint. He thinks half the battle is in the fact that he showed up to this fucking nightmare, but he hasn’t been in his right mind lately, so. Whatever.

He scuffs his feet against the shitty linoleum of the floor and against the back of the chair in front of him and against the chair beneath him. The agitation is part of why he started on this ridiculous train in the first place, the need to quiet himself and fucking _sit still_ for once, not that it worked, nothing ever _worked._

But sometimes during shows, it helped him feel like he was flying, like he was ageless and beautiful and gold.

The benzos and the smack covered him in cotton-padding, and the molly and the coke lit him up again.

He was fine, for awhile, just shortly after running away from a house with too many babies and too much noise, no room for him. He was fine for a bit when he moved in with Niall and they all started their band, and he was fine until everything hurt all the time, and he has no idea when that started.

But no. During his first NA meeting, he doesn’t pay any fucking attention to anything except that his entire body hurts.

 

Their next gig is a shit-show, not just because Louis’ basically sober for once but also because they’re all at each other’s throats with worry and anxiety and fear. Louis would blame himself if he had any space left in his brain for anything besides fury.

He’s furious about the pitying looks Liam’s giving him, he’s furious that Zayn’s sniping to his girlfriend on his mobile, he’s furious that Niall feels claustrophobic in this—yet again—shitty pub, despite the fact that it means their band might get some recognition for once, he’s furious that he can’t seem to stop sweating, and he’s furious that his bones ache.

Honestly, he would readily welcome bleeding teeth over this.

Instead he gets a semi-decent show in a packed pub in the middle of Manchester and he’s furious that he just has to _put up with it._

 

He doesn’t offer to talk until his fourth NA meeting, where he speaks about his first experience with coke withdrawal and doesn’t look anyone in the eye.

 

He gets a sponsor named Caroline, and he assures her that he is very gay and not at all interested, and she laughs and says she’s married with a daughter. Louis’ never met an addict with a kid, that he knows of anyway, and for some reason it makes him talk about his siblings. At length. For almost a half-hour.

They set up a twice-weekly coffee date, although Louis warns her he’s going to buy tea, and they store one another’s numbers in their mobiles.

 

Two weeks later, Louis’ awoken in the middle of the night by a series of loud thumps at the door of their flat, followed by a sound that may very well be a collapsing body. He swears to himself, hot panic firing through his chest as he stumbles around in the dark.

Zayn’s leaning in the doorjamb, eyes bright and wild, blood caked around his nostrils.

“Is this real?” Louis cannot _help_ but ask, ushering Zayn into their flat.

“Lou, little Loubear, I’m flying away,” Zayn assures him, even as Louis walks them both to the bathroom so they can possibly clean this situation up. “Where else would I go to?”

“You know I’m, like. In recovery, or whatever. Right?” Louis asks, voice low in his throat as he starts the tap and finds a flannel that’s hopefully not to disgusting.

Zayn blanches. “Fuck, I’m so sorry, fuck.” He backs up so quickly he nearly falls into the bath, but he lets Louis sit him down on the lid of the closed toilet.

“It’s—it’s okay.” It’s maybe even a little refreshing to see things from the outside, to see what of a mess he always seems to get himself into. It’s nice to be a caretaker rather than one taken care of. Maybe.

 

It’s not nice when Zayn’s nose starts bleeding again and they have to huddle over the sink, waiting for it all to stop.

 

Louis doesn’t listen to Zayn’s myriad protestations about how it was _just one time_ and he’s _like totally fine, really,_ just drags him along to the next meeting.

He does warn him about the coffee, though.

 

Zayn’s sporadic with it, but Louis takes to the meetings like religion, which is probably a personality defect best looked into during therapy. Once he can afford therapy.

He’s seven months sober (from everything but cigarettes and beer, because honestly, their band only ever plays in pubs and beer has always been the _least_ of his problems) when he hears a familiar drawl and spies a familiar face.

“Hi, stranger,” Harry says, stealing the uncomfortable folding chair next to Louis’ uncomfortable folding chair.

Louis raises a brow. “I should be more surprised, I suppose.”

“You should?”

Louis shrugs. “Just got one question.”

“Shoot.”

“Are you real?”

Harry nods slowly. “Yeah. Are you?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

And they share a secret smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Aka "just fuck me up."
> 
> tumblr: musiclily  
> fandom tumblr: littlebint


End file.
